Blood, sweat and tears in the desert

Thursday 24 August 2006 19.02 EDT
First published on Thursday 24 August 2006 19.02 EDT

Last week I went to a screening of John Ford's The Searchers. The unusual thing was that it was shown in Monument Valley, the famous location for so many westerns. How many chances do you get to see these pictures screened in the place where they were filmed? So I rented a car that was big enough to sleep in, and drove from Oregon to Monument Valley to take in the show.

It's a journey of about 1,300 miles, and most of it is desert, once you descend from the pine forests. You see so many buttes and mesas and coloured rock formations en route that Monument Valley's famous pinnacles seem almost homely and human-scale by comparison.

Perhaps that was what attracted John Ford to the place. Ford made many westerns, and all the good ones were shot here. Sergio Leone used it in Once Upon a Time in the West as a handsome occasional backdrop, but Ford inhabited the place: there are some studio sequences, but almost all of The Searchers was shot in the Valley. Really shot there: there is no back-projection, no fake horse-riding against a blue screen. Ford took his actors to the desert, and got them dirty, hot and sweaty. That was how he made them act.

The Searchers is an unusual film. Very few American films deal with race, and race hatred, in such unsentimental terms. Its hero, Ethan Edwards - played by John Wayne - is an embittered Confederate soldier, who, in the aftermath of the war, has become a bandit. He has little time for anyone, white or red, unless they're his immediate family. In particular, he hates Indian renegades, and when a band of Commanche renegades massacre his nearest and dearest, he embarks on a 10-year trek to rescue a white girl, Debbie, whom the Commanche chief, Scar, has kidnapped.

The postmodern take on The Searchers is that Ethan Edwards is a racist. Ford's view of him is more ambiguous. Reflecting this, the organisers of the screening made up two posters, both depicting Wayne's face: one says Soldier, Lover, Uncle, Hero; the other, Bigot, Racist, Killer ... Hero. That is indeed the character he plays.

At one point, he and his sidekick, the ridiculous Marty, find several women who have been kidnapped by Scar's band. "It's hard to believe they're white," burbles Marty. "They ain't white any more - they're Commanche," Ethan grimly replies. When he finds that Debbie (Natalie Wood in lipstick and a Pocahontas outfit) has gone native, he decides to kill her. But he can't go through with it. And, notably, it's Ethan Edwards, not the pious Marty or the preacher sheriff, who can speak Commanche and Navajo.

What does modern America make of The Searchers? Every town of the old west has sent kids - poor whites, poor Indians - to the Iraq war. Each town has a sign welcoming the kids back, or mourning the one who died. Each town has a video store, full of western DVDs, The Searchers often prominently displayed.

There aren't any simple answers in The Searchers. Wayne is bad, but Wayne does good. Scar is bad, but is he worse than Edwards - the embittered killer, veteran of an ignoble war, whose family need his capacity for violence, but don't like him any more? At the end of the film the reunited survivors enter the family home. Wayne/Edwards waits outside. He wants to be invited in. But nobody invites him. They don't need his violence now, and so they close the door.

No such complex film could be made by Hollywood today. In the absence of any truth-telling - about racial issues, about the easy American bent for violence, about the homeland which seems to need that violence, yet won't cop to it - perhaps it's time to revisit The Searchers. Even if it's not on the big screen against the buttes of Monument Valley, it's still worth a serious look.